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10 Invaluable Benefits of Nutrition Counseling
Each year, Americans spend billions of dollars to look younger, lose weight, and attempt to function physically and mentally at 75 as they did at 25.
But what if you could get lasting health impacts by opening your refrigerator or kitchen pantry? You can, says High Quality Home Therapy’s certified functional nutritionist Cathy Osipow, CPT. In this blog, we share our insights on nutrition counseling and how it can help you build a healthy relationship with food that lasts a lifetime.
What is nutrition counseling?
You may have experience with a nutritionist adjusting your diet to address your particular health concerns if you have a chronic disease like diabetes, a condition like celiac disease, or are overweight or obese. While these all typically utilize nutrition counseling, that’s just the tip of the iceberg.
At the core of nutrition counseling is one critical premise: Every cell in your body depends on getting the right combination of nutrients and vitamins to perform its given function optimally. Essentially, nutrition counseling unlocks the secret sauce of living a healthier life.
At High Quality Home Therapy, nutrition counseling begins with an initial consultation to gather baseline information, including your current eating and exercise habits, medical and family medical history, and wellness goals. This data provides the basis for your unique nutrition plan.
Our nutrition specialists know that changing habits is never easy. Our team meets you where you are and guides you through the process by offering one-on-one therapy and nutrition counseling sessions. We can even provide off-site field trips to your favorite grocery store to help navigate nutrition labels and develop new meal plans.
Flipping the script on the food narrative
When food and health are prevalent, the conversation is often about diets and losing weight. Nutrition and dieting are two entirely different things.
Dieting is usually a short-term, one-size-fits-all exercise in calorie restriction that doesn’t work for everyone. Nutrition counseling flips the script on food in important ways, helping you build a healthier relationship with food that provides lasting health benefits, such as the following:
1. Focuses on the quality of your food, not the quantity
Nutrition counseling is laser-focused on quality, not quantity. So, instead of counting calories, your nutrition specialist guides you through a meal plan, selecting foods based on the vitamins and nutrients they provide to fuel your body. This strategic approach ultimately leads to fewer nutritional deficiencies, such as calcium.
2. Teaches you what your body needs to operate optimally
When you take calories out of the spotlight, patients better understand what it truly means to eat a balanced diet and that vitamins and nutrients enhance energy and performance.
3. Provides a long-term strategy for healthy living
Nutrition counseling isn’t a quick endeavor to drop a few pounds to fit in that little black dress for your upcoming reunion; it’s beneficial for achieving sustainable overall optimal health.
4. Personalizes your needs and wellness goals
Another crucial benefit nutrition counseling offers patients is a personalized plan dialed in for your age, activity level, unique health needs, wellness goals, medical history, and lifestyle.
5. Makes it easier to maintain a healthy weight
Not surprisingly, when you focus on what your body truly needs, you set up a perfect storm for losing weight and losing weight easier. The result is maintaining a healthy weight, often with less body fat. Yes, please!
6. Reduces your risk for chronic diseases
A great bonus of maintaining a healthy weight is that it makes you less vulnerable to developing chronic diseases like high blood pressure, type 2 diabetes, and heart disease.
7. Manages disease better
Similarly, if you’ve already been diagnosed with a chronic disease, nutrition counseling is also remarkable for managing your condition. If you have high blood pressure or diabetes, nutrition counseling can help manage your condition.
8. Boosts immunity
Eating well with vitamins and nutrients is a perfect tool to prime your body’s healing and immunity functions to combat infection and disease.
9. Enhances clarity, alertness, and cognitive functioning
The benefits reaped by the quality of the food you eat don’t end with physical or metabolic advantages. Your nutrition plan can improve alertness, clarity, and brain function.
10. Offers a cost-efficient approach to wellness
Nutrition counseling also provides a more cost-efficient strategy for healthcare and wellness. You’re more likely to be healthier when you eat nutritious meals that fuel your body for optimal operation, requiring fewer doctor visits or costly medical expenses.
To learn more about nutrition counseling, call High Quality Home Therapy in Stamford, Connecticut, today or use our online tool to schedule an appointment.